The Mercer is still New York's most enticing hotel

I first heard about The Mercer from Jay-Z. Not directly. It’s remarkable how rarely we speak these days. But via the song ‘Otis’, on the album ‘Watch the Throne’, which landed on my iPod Touch in the heady summer of 2011, just after I (and everyone else in the known universe) had turned 21 — that summer when I spent at least one night a week sleeping fitfully in the back seat of an acquaintance's Volvo Estate in ill-fitting black tie in a field in the Home Counties. Jay-Z did not sleep in Volvo Estates, it was clear to me even then, as I listened to the song and its squealing Otis Redding sample pretty much on repeat that July. He slept somewhere called ‘The Mercer’, which he mentioned with barked jubilation in the song’s lyrics: a hotel, I learned, in SoHo in Downtown Manhattan — a location with the same mythical ring as ‘Atlantis’ or ‘El Dorado’. (I would later learn that Jay-Z and Kanye West and their team occupied six rooms at the hotel for several months as they recorded and completed the album, and even held its breakout listening party in Suite 208.)

It’s amazing how vividly three syllables can be seared into the 21-year-old psyche. Viewed from downtown Oxfordshire, The Mercer sounded like a place of impossible adventure and cool. I looked at photos of it in the night. Its huge red brick walls, smoothed and mellowed with age, had a solidity and a confidence that Cotswold stone simply didn’t. The cobbles of the street outside its high doors seemed to hum with all the siren-like clichés of New York: yellow cabs with furious drivers; steam billowing up from the underworld.

It is nice to see a childhood dream upheld. Most heroes are not worth meeting, but on a sunny afternoon in May I stepped happily out of a yellow cab (the novelty, even after many trips to New York in the intervening years, does not dull) and into the quiet, understated lobby of The Mercer and felt instantly uplifted. It’s the little things that vindicate one. Like the fact that the concierge hands you not a plastic key card but a solid, gleaming, broad-bowed metal key, in-set with bold American typography. It clicks solidly into the lock of the room door, clad in brushed steel and reassuringly thick and heavy. (Why, you think — one could record a seminal rap album in here!)

Inside, the room is illuminated airily by a pair of ceiling-height French double doors, which overlook a pleasingly downtown view of iron fire escapes and art-deco cornices. The furnishings are handsome, sophisticated, understated. Whites and pale tones, with warmth and softness donated by glowing amber lamp shades and the sheer luxuriousness of the linens. The bathtub is ludicrously capacious.

Downstairs, the restaurants are a swoony fever-dream of New York chic. Sartriano’s, the Italianate power restaurant, sits below deck in glowering, muscular splendour — a low-lit slouch of Carrara marble, exposed brick and Riva-grade wood. The food is exactly what you’d hope for — fusilli with rugged Tuscan beef ragu; agnolotti in a slick umami reduction; a vast platter of “Sunday sauce” paccheri to share; steaks as thick as bibles in the Florentine tradition.

The Mercer is a place of intrigue. One mid-morning, merry with that giddy first-day exhaustion that jet-lag always brings, I strolled through the lobby and out into the sunlight in my favoured outfit of baseball cap, sunglasses, and jowls. For a moment I was blinded by the vibrating New York sunlight — but saw, a second later, a semi-circle of paparazzi spread about the cobbles, accompanied by a chorus of tourists who’d paused to see who it was the paparazzi were waiting for. The possibilities must have seemed endless. What great luminary or shimmering grandee might be staying at The Mercer on that particular Tuesday? Why, all of them, surely. But not, perhaps, some idiotically beaming Englishman, happy to have scratched a fifteen-year itch. The camera lenses lowered in visible disappointment as I strolled out through the door. The cabs honked, the cobbles rumbled, and the beautiful possibility of The Mercer endured.

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